8 ways to emotionally mess up your kids

Monday

Jan 27, 2014 at 12:01 AMJan 27, 2014 at 3:38 PM

Sherrie Campbell / Special to The Gazette

Our children are the lights of our lives. We all start off as parents envisioning nothing but success, love and happiness for them. However, these dreams often do not manifest because they are not getting the important things they need to become disciplined, mature and motivated adults. Here are eight parenting mess ups. Avoid these things, as they will guarantee your child will suffer from depression, anxiety, anger, tense family relationships, problems with friends, low self-esteem, a sense of entitlement and chronic emotional problems throughout their life.

1. Ignoring or minimizing your child’s feelings:If your child is expressing sadness, anger or fear and you mock them, humiliate them, ignore or tease them, you minimize what they feel. You essentially tell them what they feel is wrong. When parents do this, they withhold love from their child and miss opportunities to have open and vulnerable connections teaching them to bond and to know they are loved unconditionally.

2. Having Inconsistent rules:If you never talk about your expectations, you keep your child from knowing how to behave appropriately. Children live up or down to what you expect. Rules give them guidelines and boundaries to help them define who they are good and bad. If you keep your child guessing and life is vague, they will begin to act out to find the boundaries themselves, which leads to low self-esteem and problem behavior.

3. Making your child your friend:This is a bad idea. Don’t share all your worries, concerns and relationship problems with your child or ask their advice. If you act helpless and defeated to your children, they will never learn to respect you and will treat you as an equal or an inferior because you have used them for your own therapy. You must show your children you can stand up to problems, face your challenges and handle life through all the stress and come out the other side. Be real, have your emotions but do not burden your children.

4. Putting down your child’s other parent:If you never show affection and love to your partner/spouse in front of your child, they do not develop a barometer for what love is or what it looks like. If you are always putting your spouse down and rejecting him/her, threatening divorce, you create a chronic state of anxiety for your child. If you are already divorced and you remain cold, distant, bitter angry and blaming of your ex-spouse, you are sending the subtle message to your child that your ex-spouse is the cause of the divorce and you need to be the preferred parent. This is parent alienation.

5. Punishing independence and separation:When we punish our child for growing up, we make them feel guilty for having normal developmental needs and desires, which often cause deep insecurity, rebellion, cutting and other forms of behaviors to be able to branch out and be themselves as an independent person.

6. Treating your child as an extension of you:If, as a parent you link you own image and self-worth to your child’s appearance, performance, behavior, grades and how many friends they have, you let them know they are loved not for who they are but for how well they perform and make you look good. This turns them into pleasers rather than doers, and they will always worry about being good enough.

7. Mettling in your child’s relationships:Directing every action your child takes in their relationships from friends to teachers inhibits their maturity. For example, if your child gets in trouble at school and you immediately rush to talk to the teacher to get them off the hook, or you are constantly telling your child how to be a friend, as your child grows he/she will never learn to navigate the sharper edges relationships bring on their own.

8. Over-protecting:When we protect our child from every problem and emotion, it creates a sense of entitlement, over-protection, and inflated self-esteem that often crosses the line into narcissism. They expect life to be easier than it is. They want everything done for them no matter how they behave. They then become depressed and confused when they don’t get what they believe they deserve.

Sherrie Campbell, a licensed psychologist with two decades of clinical training and experience, specializes in psychotherapy with adults and teenagers. She’s the author of “Loving Yourself: The Mastery of Being Your Own Person.”